hello again!

Where has she been?
It's 2009, for crying out loud!

Geez!

ski day count: #11, #12, #13...









...#14, #15, #16

New Year's Eve
70's style













painting and reupholstering chairs

sanding, painting, and hanging molding

spray painting skulls
(Sorry, that sounds gross, but they look so hip in all the home decor mags... do they use real skulls, though? We do here in Montana.)

I'm so glad to be back! I've missed you all!
Montessori to come tomorrow, promise! :)

a language game

This was going to be part of my "busy hands" post, but it's such a fun (and important) game, I decided to give it its own post!

playing a
blending game
with a teacher

**How to play this game:

Set 3 cards in front of the child, saying what is on each card. Have the child repeat what each picture is of after you say it. For example: "Dog. Please say dog." Next, say, "Please point to d-o-g (saying the sounds of the letters)." They child must then blend the sounds together to figure out which picture you're talking about. To make this game more challenging, put longer and longer pauses between the letter sounds. It's also fun have the child close her eyes, and then, you hide a dot under one of the pictures. "The dot is hidden under the d-o-g." An abstract version of this game could be played without pictures. "I'm thinking about something, and I'll give you a clue to see if you can figure it out. I'm thinking about a d-o-g. " When the child is able to tell you the sounds she hears in words, she's now segmenting. Segmenting is the key to reading success!

busy hands

carefully sewing

a wreath for Christmas

Has anyone actually figured
out the plots of these
"Bob" books?

building equilateral triangles with
the subdivided triangle box

write your heart out, kid

snip, snip, snip

ta da!

making a chain
with Christmas wrapping paper

counting stamps
for a number book

giving some love to the

freshly washed baby

ski day #10

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas...
keep on coming down, snow!

a snowflake tutorial

Yesterday afternoon was spent making snowflake garlands. I got the idea from maya*made. Check it out here. I am in love with the way they look, hanging in my front window. I couldn't get a good picture of all of them (I made 4 strands of 8 snowflakes). Anyway, children love making snowflakes, too, so I'm trying to fine-tune a snowflake lesson for the classroom in January.

Did you know that all snowflakes have 6 sides? So, I used the hexagon from the geometry cabinet as my snowflake outline.

I can't afford anything from Anthropologie, but I do love the beautiful pages of their catalogs. I traced a hexagon on this page with a pen.

After tracing, I cut out the hexagon shape. I think magazine/catalog paper would be easier for kids to cut through than regular paper.

I folded the hexagon in half, from corner to corner. ( I flipped it over first, so the picture would be right-side up after I folded.)

Then, I folded the lower right corner up and over to the upper left corner.

I folded the lower left corner up and over to the opposite corner to make a triangle.

Snip, snip, snip! These are fairly crude snips - do you see my huge, dull, kitchen scissors?!

It still turned out beautiful! :) I can only imagine the incredible snowflakes that could be made with sharp, little, scrap booking scissors!

After cutting out enough snowflakes to make a garland - in my case, 8, I strung them on nylon thread. I mostly laced the thread through the openings I had cut in the paper, but every once and awhile, especially near the edges, I sewed through the paper. By sewing though the paper, I am still able to slide the snowflakes up and down to arrange them, but they don't slide down on their own.

I finished each strand off with a sequin and a bead. This added weight helps the garland hang straight down, and it looks pretty, huh?

I set up a snowflake lesson for the kindergartners last week as an experiment. This is what it looked like.

The folding part was pretty challenging, but they figured it out after awhile. If I set this lesson up for younger children, I might pre-fold all the hexagons and just show them how to cut snips out of the edges. Hmmm... that would take away all the tracing and folding, though.

We used scrap booking paper, and it was really hard to cut through when it was all folded up. Magazine paper would be much more manageable.

Ta DA!
We love snow around here!